1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to an improved computing device. More specifically, the present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for providing selective view of on-line surveys.
2. Description of Related Art
In web based environments where surveys are conducted at given intervals, the survey may change each time it is given. That is, questions may be added, removed or modified, possible answer selections to the questions may be added, removed, or modified, and the like.
In such surveys, when the survey is updated, the answers to the old questions may be lost. This is because the answers to the questions are typically stored in a separate database from the survey itself. If the survey is modified, the answers will no longer correlate one to one with the survey questions in the updated survey.
In addition, when new data is added to a survey, or data is deleted from the suvey, the old data remaining in the survey may become corrupted. That is the old data may be entirely or partially overwritten or removed by the addition or deletion of data in the survey.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have an apparatus and method for providing selective views of on-line surveys so that answer data is not lost and survey data is not corrupted when the survey is updated.
The present invention provides an apparatus and method for providing selective views of on-line surveys. With the present invention, each survey has a survey data structure and a template data structure. In a preferred embodiment, the data structures represent tree structures having nodes, child nodes, links between nodes and child nodes, and the like, for the survey and the template.
Changes to the survey are made in the template data structure. The survey data structure and the template data structure are compared to one another, and nodes are either added, subtracted, or modified based on the differences between the survey data structure and the template data structure. In this way, the survey data structure retains the information that is already in present in it, such as the questions and answers previously provided.
Thereafter, when the survey is again presented to a user, the user""s previous answers to questions still remaining in the survey are displayed but no answers are displayed for newly added questions. In addition, if the questions are modified, the modified questions are presented with no answers displayed until provided by the user. In this way, answer data for questions that were previously answered and are still remaining in the survey after modification are not lost. In addition, the survey data itself is not corrupted by the modification of the survey because old data and/or questions that remain in the survey are not overwritten or deleted. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be described in, or will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art in view of, the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.